Jenny, 47, a former investment banker at Lazard Freres and the mother of four children, mostly feels sorry for her errant husband, 49, who claimed he was hiking the Appalachian Trail in June when he was actually in Buenos Aires visiting María Belén Chapur, 43, a divorced mother of two who worked briefly as a TV correspondent.

“He was just obsessed with going to see this woman,” Jenny told Vogue. “I have learned that these affairs are almost like an addiction to alcohol or pornography; they just can’t seem to break away from them.”

As for Chapur, “I am sure she is a fine person. It can’t be fun for her, though I do sometimes question her judgment . . . All I can do is pray for her because she made some poor choices,” Jenny said.

Politics is partly to blame, she theorized, because of the inflated ego that develops with elected office. “Politicians become disconnected from the way everyone else lives in the world,” Jenny said. “I saw that from the very beginning. They’ll say they need something, and 10 people want to give it to them. It’s an ego boost, and it’s easy to drink your own Kool-Aid.”

But Jenny said Mark was the last person anyone would guess was a philanderer. “It never occurred to me that he would do something like that,” she told the magazine. “The person I married was centered on a core of morals. The person who did this is not centered on those morals.”